A Necessary End (10 page)

I
flip through a copy of
Maternity Monthly
and then toss it aside. It's been more than a half hour. What are they saying in there? Is anything wrong with the baby?

I'd assumed Leah would let me come into the exam room with her while she met her new doctor. I would have stepped outside or turned away for the actual physical exam: a woman's right to privacy, her body is her own, it's her temple, all that crap. But you'd think I'm entitled to ask questions, seeing as the baby she's carrying is intended for me.

Instead, the receptionist called Leah's name and she leapt up, saying, “I'll be back soon.” I was too surprised to protest. In her wake, I realized that Hal hadn't covered this contingency in the contract, so I'm shit out of luck, legally. I'm not her mother, though the receptionist clearly thought I was during check-in.

I shouldn't take it personally. These appointments must stir up a complex brew of emotions for someone in her position. Still, I thought Leah and I had gotten closer after the talk by the elevator bank, after we returned hand-in-hand and I signed away my life for the next year.

I want to witness the ultrasound, to see my baby moving in real time. Then I'd know, with absolute certainty, that all this is real. I mean, I'm almost sure now. I touch Leah's belly a lot, and I don't see how those kicks could be faked. But absolute certainty is pretty tantalizing, and it's right inside that exam room, just out of reach.

If I knocked on the door, would Leah have the heart (or the balls) to deny me?

It might feel good momentarily, but I have to think big-picture here. Leah has a year to renege. I can't afford to have her storing up little resentments.

Yes, it chafes, but I have to let Leah feel like she's in control. That's the only way to wrest it away from her later.

There's a pregnant woman about my age sitting across from me. Speaking of resentments, I can't help but feel a few when I see her. I don't know why she should get to do it herself, while I'm at the mercy of Leah's uterus.

She notices me looking at her and smiles. I smile back, though it feels tight and unnatural across my lips. I lower my eyes to communicate that I'm not up for talking. I've noticed that pregnant women in their late thirties and beyond are eager to share their good fortune. There's this vibe of excited relief, of “I thought it might never happen for me but here I am!” that I don't feel like ingesting.

A few more minutes, and Leah reappears. She gathers up her jacket and walks toward the elevators, not saying anything. She stabs the button. “How did it go?” I ask.

She shrugs.

“What does that mean? Is he healthy? Is everything okay?”

“Yes,” she says with an air of condescending über-patience. “I told you he was fine, and he is. He's totally healthy.”

Air whooshes out of me. I hadn't even noticed that I'd stopped breathing for a minute there. “Did you like the doctor?”

“She's okay.” The elevator arrives. We step in and descend.

Leah obviously doesn't want to talk, but I can't accept that. She
left me sitting in the waiting room, she shut me out of the whole wondrous miracle of gestation, and she
shrugged
when I asked how it went instead of leading with his being healthy. Is she toying with me? Is this whole thing one colossal mindfuck? Not again. Never again.

“What did the doctor tell you?” I say challengingly as we walk toward the car.

Leah comes to a dead stop on the pavement. She thrusts a paper out to me that's been clutched in her hand.

I take it and smooth it out. My eyes widen. It's a triptych of him. On thin, shiny paper, there are three pictures of my son. Make no mistake: It is a son. One of the pictures can best be described as full frontal. And there he is, in profile, plus a close-up—a glamour shot—of his beautiful resting face. I can't quite see Gabe or me, but I'll look more carefully later. For now, I need to look at Leah.

“Thank you. He's . . .” Real, that's what I want to say. He's not merely beautiful, he's real, and he's mine.

“So it really is a boy?” she says. I see a hint of pain in her face. She's made a point of never knowing before. Maybe she never even watches the ultrasounds in progress, doesn't want to watch him suspended in amniotic fluid. Gabe's right: Nothing's 100 percent. If Leah is protecting herself, then there can be reasonable doubt.

“You don't look during the ultrasounds, do you?” I ask gently.

She shakes her head. I think she's trying not to cry but when she looks back up at me, her face is hard.

“You didn't want me in there, oohing and aahing, getting all happy, making it real.” She doesn't answer, but I know I'm right. I step toward her. “Maybe,” I say, my voice soft as down, “you should try it. Make him real.” I unfurl the pictures. “You're going to see him soon enough, in the flesh.”

Her eyes are a touch frightened, but she does as I've instructed. She tries.

“Beautiful, right?” I say.

“He's okay,” she allows, almost smiling.

I'm doing it for me, inoculating her. Any denial on her part is a threat. I don't want her to see him for the first time in the delivery room and be overwhelmed with love. Titration is key.

I'm doing this for him, too. Leah's not ready to be a mother, and she says so herself, all the time. She's not even twenty, she dropped out of college because people were gossiping about her, she seems to have no family or financial support to speak of, and the father gleefully signed his rights away. In her rational mind, she knows the best thing is to give him up. An about-face in the throes of postpartum love and hormones doesn't mean she can provide a good life for him. Gabe and I are the logical choice, the one made in cold consideration rather than hot emotion.

So, men and women of the jury, I rest my case. I direct you to Exhibit A, the ultrasound. Oh, you need to see him. I can't even imagine what I'll feel when I hold him. He will want for nothing, that I can promise. I'll keep him safe.

I'm smiling at him, riding a swell of maternal pride and adoration, when my eyes graze the corner of the paper. I see Leah's name and today's date and the medical group (good, further proof it's real) and then something else:
36w1d
. Thirty-six weeks, one day. Leah's farther along than I thought. Farther than she said.

My baby's practically here.

I
like this one better,” Leah says. She runs her hand along the edge of the crib. It's a dark wood, which isn't really my taste, but just as significant, it's not in our budget. I feel like telling Leah we can't buy a $1,200 crib because we're going to spend the next year giving her pocket money.

I smile and say yes, that
is
a nice crib, it's among our top three choices, for sure. Then, with my back toward her and my front toward Gabe, I roll my eyes.

He steps up to the crib, fingers the tag, and announces, “This
crib is twelve hundred dollars! Hell no!” Instead of being offended, Leah laughs. I'm getting so tired of their language that I can't seem to speak, and of jaunts where we include her like she's already a member of the family.

I move toward a reasonably priced sage-green crib that would be perfect, but on the tag, it says that color needs to be ordered a month in advance.

“White's in stock,” I say, masking my disappointment. “They could deliver it this week.”

I see Gabe's mouth set in a disagreeable line. He's thinking about his garage-bound pool table.

“You barely play pool anymore,” I remind him.

“Well, I won't now.” He sounds sulky.

Leah jabs him in the side. “It's
California,
” she says. “How cold will it get in the garage? Wuss.”

I should be the one jabbing my husband in the side, joking him out of his snit. Who does she think she is?

The mother of my child, that's who.

I remind myself I'm the one carrying the ultrasound in her purse, I'm the one in love with him already.

“With a white crib, we need to get bedding that pops, you know?” I say to Gabe, ignoring Leah. “We can paint the walls, maybe even hire someone to do a mural.”

“How much would a mural cost?”

“I could do it,” Leah volunteers.

I look at her in surprise.

“I'm good at art. I've thought before about taking art classes, or something like, I don't know, graphic design, but I'm shit with computers, so I don't know.” She crosses her arms across her chest. “Forget it, it's a stupid idea.”

“No, it's a great idea,” Gabe says. “I mean, unless you're not supposed to be breathing in the paint fumes.”

What fumes has Gabe been huffing? It's a terrible idea. Leah
painting cows jumping over the moon, or sheep that the baby can grow up to count when he can't sleep—she's just going to get more attached to him. Someday, he'll ask me who painted it, and I'll have to say his birth mom, and she'll be in his thoughts every night. Or worse, she'll have taken him with her and all we'll be left with is her damn mural.

Maybe that's what Gabe wants, deep down. He wants us to try and fail, and then I can get this baby thing out of my system once and for all.

“It could be dark and edgy but beautiful, like your tattoo design,” Gabe tells Leah.

Dark and edgy? It's a mural for a baby's room. “What tattoo?” I've never heard her say anything about it. I've definitely never seen it.

“It's the tattoo I'm going to have someday,” Leah explains. “I showed Gabe the picture I drew. It's sort of like an enchanted forest.”

“Beautiful but a little bit creepy,” he adds. He unleashes a huge smile. “Yeah, you should do it!”

“They make nontoxic paint.” She says it with a hesitant but growing excitement.

“They do,” I say, “but I wouldn't feel comfortable. It's still chemicals, right? Whatever you breathe in, the baby breathes in, too.”

“I can do it after I've had the baby,” she says, and there's a flash of something in her eyes. Is it defiance? I can't really say no to her, not unless I want to risk offending her about the one thing she says she's good at; until she signs away her parental rights, she holds all the cards. Well, at most, fifty-one of them. The trump card could have “CPS” written on it.

But I'd rather not go there, for everyone's sake. Let's hope she doesn't force my hand.

“It could be, like, a creative outlet or something,” she continues. “Like a gift from me to him. You know, a good-bye gift.”

“We can talk about it after he's here,” I say. “Let's wait and see how you're feeling. Having a baby is a physical trauma, you know?
Not to mention the hormone fluctuations. I don't want you to feel overwhelmed.”

“I think I'll be up to it.” She's persistent, this one. I really don't know what she'll be like after childbirth, how it'll change her. She could be weaker or more formidable.

“If it's okay, I'd like to see the design. I don't really think ‘edgy' and ‘newborn' go together.” I smile like we're sharing a joke, though Leah and I never share jokes. That's Gabe's department. I look at him, silently asking for backup.

“That's what would be cool about it,” he says. “It wouldn't scream ‘baby.'” Then he sees my face. “But yeah, we should all agree on the design.”

I pretend to study the changing table that matches the boring-ass white crib. I'm trying not to detonate.

Sometimes I get these twinges, painful reminders of how it should be. I should be rotund like Leah, and Gabe and I should have $1,200 to spend on a crib if we want. We shouldn't be buying a crib made of unspecified hardwoods. It should be oak or mahogany, something real and solid. But instead, our money is going to Leah. We finance her new life, and in return, we get her baby. It's a bargain we should never have had to strike. We've been betrayed by physiology.

In contrast to my mood, Leah's suddenly as high as I've ever seen her. She starts spinning this web, describing different images she could do for the mural, and I want to be excited by her excitement, the way Gabe seems to be. Because if she insists on painting a mural, she'll win; I can't risk alienating her.

I once heard a piece of advice: If you want someone on your side, get on theirs first. There's no better way to do that than supporting her aspirations.

This is also a chance for me to hone my maternal instinct. Leah's still a kid. If only I could see her like that, if I could nurture her.

I need to try. I'm going to take her under my wing. We can visit art colleges together. I can help her find herself, give her the courage
to follow her dreams, all that clichéd shit. She gets a great life with no regrets; Gabe and I have our family. It's win-win. As Gabe always says, those are rare.

“That sounds great, Leah,” I say, offering my most maternal smile.

But she's so deep in her riff with Gabe, she barely seems to notice.

I'm going to be the mother I never had, the one I wanted. That's the pledge I made to myself a long time ago. I can start practicing now, with Leah. If she sees that she's like my daughter, she won't have the heart to steal my son. She's not ready to be a mother, and she'll feel that I am, firsthand.

I have a feeling Leah's parents were as rejecting as my mother. Leah doesn't talk about them at all, and the fact that they clearly froze her out over the pregnancy—that doesn't come out of nowhere. There are myriad small rejections before the big one, death by a thousand cuts.

My mother used to cut me all the time. When I was a little girl, it was paper cuts; later came the slashes. I practically bled out on her furniture and she never even noticed.

I remember being in third grade—third grade, just a little older than my kiddos at school!—and she took me for IQ testing. Ostensibly, it was to see if I qualified for the Mentally Gifted program at my elementary school. But really, I think she wanted to find out my value, the way you'd have an antique ring appraised at the jeweler. Did I sparkle, would I shine, was I someone to be proud of?